Here's How Your Law Firm Can Master Social Media Listening

Social media listening for law firms (also known as social listening) is a strategy that involves monitoring the social media landscape to see what people are saying about your firm, your competitors and your niche in general.

Given the usefulness of social listening, you’d think that more law firms with an active social media presence would integrate it into their digital marketing campaigns. But as it turns out, it’s a technique that’s often overlooked by many organizations, both inside and outside the legal services industry.

Why social listening is important

Shaping your law firm’s business strategy without engaging in social media listening is tantamount to setting yourself up to fail. Insights are why social listening is important. If you’re not listening to what people are saying about you and your industry, how can you give them what they want?

Monitoring social mentions will help track what your target audience likes and doesn’t like, providing valuable insights to help your firm grow. Simply put, social listening is about monitoring what people are saying about you, your competitors and your industry. The information you find can then be leveraged into your content strategy.

How to start

Although many marketers will tell you that you need tools to ensure the effectiveness of your listening strategy, the real trick behind social listening is understanding what you should be listening to.

For starters, you should identify exact keywords and topics to monitor. These include:

Your law firm’s name and name used in social media

Names of your services

Competitor names

Industry terms relevant to your firm

Slogan/catchphrase

Names of key people in your firm

Branded hashtags

Generic hashtags relevant to your niche

Once you have a good idea of what keywords you should be tracking on social media, you can then proceed with these social media listening steps.

Step 1 – Examine where people are talking about you.

Aside from monitoring what your target audience is saying about you and your industry, it’s important to know where the chatter is. In this social media listening step, you want to cast as wide a net as possible, going beyond LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to check places like FindLaw, Avvo, or Justia. You may be surprised to discover the conversations happening in these places that you previously had no idea about.

Understanding where people are talking about your firm and industry lets you create the appropriate strategy to join the conversation.

For example, with the information you discovered through social listening, you can leverage aggregator sites like FindLaw, Avvo, and Justia to improve your visibility and reach. This might be a more cost-effective strategy compared to fighting their rankings on Google.

Step 2 – Get a pulse on your competition.

While you should never copy a competitor’s strategy, you can gain valuable insights from their social media activities by looking into what your shared audience thinks. In other words, this social media listening step is about looking at the mistakes competing firms are making so you can avoid them in your social media marketing campaign.

Of course, you should also look at what they’re doing right and draw inspiration from there. But more often than not, it’s much easier to track their missteps and incorporate the lessons learned into your firm’s body of knowledge.

Step 3 – Get the entire firm involved.

This social media listening step is vital, because your listening activities will yield information that won’t just help your firm’s marketing team but will also help improve your legal team’s relationship with clients, both new and existing, and even your ability to recruit new talent.

Be sure to share your social listening insights with the rest of your firm’s relevant teams. Be sure to get their inputs, too. You never know what nugget of information will improve your firm’s services, reputation and brand.

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Putting it all together

The value of social listening as a research tool is just one of many reasons why law firms should recognize the importance of social media. Aside from aiding marketing, social listening activities can be used to develop faster and better recruitment processes, and even improve your relationship with other firms. If you’re not sure where to start, you can work with a digital marketing agency that specializes in developing custom marketing solutions for law firms and attorneys.

Be sure to act on the information you find. Social listening is only useful if you’re using the insights you gleaned to make your firm better.